The Chinese government has plans for a large military settlement on a reclaimed reef in the contested Paracel Islands, where adversaries such as the US strongly oppose Chinese expansion.

The plan for an “island city” on “Woody Island” or “Yongxing” in the Paracels, 185 miles from China’s Hainan Island… was announced by a Communist Party official for Sansha prefecture on Friday… Woody Island is the administrative center of Sansha prefecture, a Chinese territory established in 2012 to govern the Paracels. A sizeable part of the island’s territory is covered in an 8,850-foot long runway that can handle most People’s Liberation Army aircraft…

Last May, the Washington, DC-based Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative noted that Chinese development of other South China Sea islands followed the “blueprint” established at Woody Island: harbor dredging followed by airfield construction; then the building of hangars, radar and communication infrastructure; and finally the deployment of anti-air and anti-ship missiles to the location…

Beijing claims ownership of 90 percent of the South China Sea, including the Paracel Islands, but those claims are disputed by a number of nations, including several other Southeast Asian nations with overlapping claims. The US and its allies, such as the UK and Japan, have engaged in defiant Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS), during which military vessels ignore China’s claims of sea as their territorial waters and sail on as if those claims did not exist. This has led to some tense confrontations, including one last year in which US and Chinese destroyers were only a couple of dozen yards apart, Sputnik reported.

Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized “China’s illegal island-building in international waterways” and accusing the country of coercing other nations, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, into giving up some of their claims over the waterway — and the substantial hydrocarbon reserves believed to lie beneath it.

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